The exemplary embodiment relates to maintenance and repair of a device and finds particular application in connection with a system for generating operating procedures for maintenance or repair of an electromechanical device, such as a printer.
Operating procedures, such as maintenance and repair procedures used in troubleshooting problems with devices, are often provided to customers in a technical manual in the form of paper or digital documentation. In some cases, the procedures may be in the form of a set of problems and corresponding solutions which may be stored in indexed form in a knowledge base. When a user of the device wishes to identify the cause of a problem with the device or perform maintenance, the documentation is reviewed to find relevant information on the procedures which should be performed on the device, often through keyword searching.
This type of user support suffers from several limitations. For example, creating and maintaining a knowledge base of procedures is expensive. It generally entails generating a first set of procedures before the launch of a product that describes the periodic maintenance and repair procedures expected over the product life. It is then iteratively updated during the life of the product when issues are encountered by users and solutions to problems are identified by technical support personnel. This process is even more problematic when the devices being supported have a very short lifecycle and/or wide variability (e.g., in the case of printing devices or mobile phones).
Technical knowledge bases are often used for self-help web sites targeted to device users or agents answering remote calls in a call center. In the latter case, the agents may receive a number of requests with the same problems to be solved. Reviewing these interactions can be used to identify the descriptions of new problems for a given device and the associated solutions in order to enrich the knowledge base. Often, there is a fairly formalized way for technical support agents to provide feedback to knowledge base editing teams in order for them to enrich a knowledge base from the instructions they provided to the customer. However, the process of capturing this information is manually intensive and does not always identify the solution correctly, for example, because not all the steps are recorded by the agent or because the user has not performed the steps as specified.
There remains a need for a system and method to update a knowledge base that incorporates the problems faced by users of the device and the solutions developed.